Jesus I wish it weren't so but talking to people that say they are voting for Hillary when I ask them "What position does he have that you support? What policies has she supported in office that has caused you to vote for her?" and what do I get? Crickets. So you finally ask them why they are voting for her you get the "strong independent woman" meme, emphasis on the woman part.
So if you want to know why they support Hillary? at least in my area its strictly because she is a woman, they do not care about anything else.
You should try Comodo Dragon, or if you want to be bleeding edge Comodo Chromodo as the problem is NOT the Chromium engine, its the crap Google bolted on top. Comodo don't bolt that shit, nor does it phone home like Google's browser, and they are fast fast fast!
I use Pale Moon as a backup but at the end of the day I have never seen a Chromium engine browser lock up, I've seen Gecko based engines lock up at least once every browser session. Like it or not sticking with a single process engine really hurts any browser based on Mozilla's engine, its just a bad way to do it in 2015. But I stick with my previous assertion, once somebody switches? The other guy has to do something REALLY dumb to get users to switch back. Most don't notice resource usage BTW, so you are the exception and not the rule.
Sorry but if it works without the keyboard? Its a tablet.
While I'll never have one (found tablets to be rather useless compared to my netbook) I do have tons of experience dealing with customers laptops and the vast majority? Around 3 hours was what they wanted out of their laptops, anything above that was gravy. This makes sense as when was the last time you were away from an outlet for more than 3 hours?
As for MSFT beating Apple with the Surface? Again not surprising as talking to those that have one they really love the things and since it runs a full Windows OS (instead of that dumbshit Windows RT) they can leverage all that third party Windows software. I know the main reason I'm given when people are trying to practically give away their tablets to me at the shop is "it doesn't run what I need it to" IE Windows software so for those that like the tablet form factor but want to be able to run the same software they run on their desktop? Its an easy sell.
It does make me wonder if this will hurt Apple long term as there is a lot more people with Windows software they want to run than iOS software, perhaps this will spur Apple into making some sort of "MacTablet Pro" with a full OSX on it, I'm sure many here would just love to have a tablet running OSX.
With Windows if you are good at running say a Win2K server? Its really not hard to pick up Server 2K12, the underlying guts and conventions with WinServer really don't change much from what I've seen. That USED TO BE the same with Linux, but now you have the snarling hydra that is SystemD gobbling up functions left and right.
I really wish it weren't true but it does hold true to my theory that MSFT never has to worry because the biggest threat to Linux is its devs and NIH syndrome. Hell look at what happened when MSFT put out the Vista Bomb, you had the major DEs throw out years worth of work for bug ridden alpha quality code that every distro instantly made default, Windows 8? Larry Potter and the Pulsing Puking Audio, I swear if I didn't know better I'd think Linux was run by a bunch of devs from Bizzaro who sit around saying things like "Oh No, things am stable and everything is working, this will make things too easy! We must break critical drivers and subsystems with am patch and replace well written system with alpha code, then users will feel they am leet for getting it running half as good as it did and we get fat support contracts...aren't me am smart?"
More like "if they are gonna make this look like Chrome I'll just use Chrome, as its faster and doesn't hang like FF does". Is that REALLY so surprising, that if you make your product a bad ersatz of a very popular product that users might just go for the more popular one you ripped off, especially when they are both free?
At the end of the day numbers don't lie, and it looks like Mozilla is going the way of Netscape, with many users following mine and just going somewhere else and the worst part for Mozilla? Once people switch to something else nothing THEY do matters, because users will stick with the new browser as long as they don't do something radical or stupid and it doesn't look like Google, Pale Moon project, or Comodo are be as dumb as Mozilla was.
I don't think it'll help, they burned too many bridges with their "fuck the users!" attitude they've had these past several years. I know that FF was the #1 browser for my customers for several years and since Australis every.single.one has asked me to help them move to something else or gone to Chrome. I don't even bother packing FF in to my default install package anymore, they keep screwing with things so much they leave a bad taste in my customer's mouths.
Instead for those that use extensions or just prefer the originalk FF UI I offer them the choice of Pale Moon or Ice Dragon, Ice Dragon is a little more secure since it can integrate with Comodo IS to auto sandbox on launch while Pale Moon is more like old school Firefox but both are really good browsers.
But sadly I just don't see FF coming back, they have peed in their corn flake one time too many and alienated so many users I just don't see them being able to lure them back, not to mention it looks like Mozilla is about to get fucked by Yahoo with rumors pointing to Yahoo selling off most of their core assets, possibly even selling off everything and shutting down. I think if that happens they are just fucked, as nobody is gonna pay the hundreds of millions they got from Google and Yahoo for their search, not with numbers as low as they are.
Now who is jumping to conclusions? I don't prefer ANY platform, in fact I still have a Dreamcast and an original Xbox because those units had capabilities beyond playing games in their genre, Emulation for the Dreamcast and usage as an HTPC for the Xbox.
But if unit A can do X and has been doing X, despite much less resources, and unit Y cannot wtf are you supposed to say about unit Y, that its lack of capability makes it better?
But its obvious that you are a fantard with exactly fuck and all knowledge about this subject so please go back to waving your little flag nobody gives a fuck about, you are not worth wasting my time.
If I drove a Prius at 110MPH for 200 hours and it failed....would that make the Prius a POS car? Of course not because I was using the vehicle in a way it was never designed and thus contributed to its failure.
Well I hate to break the news to you but its for that very reason the Google survey is worthless, as they took consumer drives and then saturated the pipe 24/7/365 until they failed, again something that those units were never designed to do, in fact I can guarantee that wasn't even a scenario they looked at because the average consumer? They aren't slamming the living fuck out of their drives 24/7!
If you use the Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi and WD drives like a normal person does which is 4-12 hours a day of moderate workloads? Then SMART does exactly as intended and warns them ahead of time, I should know because I probably bin a good 70-100 drives a year because they've worn out and again its been years where there weren't quite obvious warning signs like delayed write failure warnings and SMART errors. Contrast this to the many SSDs I've binned where the user just fired their PC up one morning and...nothing. No warning, no error, you just get a brick that can't be seen by EFI/BIOS, you might as well have tried to put a ham sandwich on the SATA bus for all the warning you get.
Not as long as your average HDD does and with the race to the bottom? Its only gonna get worse.
The reason why many drives were so high in 2012 is most were SLC while today its pretty damned hard to find anything other than enterprise that isn't MLC, in fact I don't think a single manufacturer makes an SSD that is SLC for the consumer market anymore. Whats worse is as they keep adding bits to MLC to both increase capacity and lower cost the MTBF for each cell just plummets and on its best day with perfect conditions you're looking at 10k writes with MLC versus 100,000 writes with SLC, and that was with the original 2 bits per cell, according to Wikipedia its now up to 4 bits per cell.
Now does this mean I think we should avoid SSDs? Nope in fact they are the boot drives on most new builds and swapping HDDs for SSDs on laptops is the least expensive way I know of to boost performance, but I make sure they have a HDD with a backup image, whether its built in or USB, because IMHO its unwise to trust your important data to an SSD.
Finally the rotting elephant in the room with SSDs is the way they fail and that is without warning. I'm sure I'll be slammed with anecdotes about HDDs that failed without warning (Protip: Avoid Seagate) but honestly its been quite a few years since I've seen a HDD just fail without giving the user plenty of warning, with an SSD? I've thrown many an SSD into the trash because they failed without warning.
TLDR? In a race to the bottom like SSDs is in now quality goes to shit as does MTBF, for years HDDs have been proven reliable tech and as its capacity climbs by adding more bits per cell SSDs will give up life and reliability for size.
So asking about an OS architecture and its capabilities is trolling now? Well wtf is the point of asking questions here, lets all just wave our little flags like a bunch of fanbois, shall we?
And how does it not have to do with the OS being primitive when it comes to multitasking when PCs have been able to do this for years and do so with ease? I get that for the majority of its life consoles have been single tasking systems but surely they could hire some OS developers to get them up to speed, yes? Because even my netbook APU (which is the chip they based the Jaguar on) can easily switch from a game like Grimlock to a howto page within a couple seconds, faster if I could be arsed to swap out the 5400RPM HDD to an SSD.
So are these OSes simply incapable of FIFO round robin processing? Or have the companies that made them simply decided this was not something worth pursuing? Because dedicating an entire X86 APU to the UI, let alone two? I'm sorry but you can scream and whine all you want, that is wasteful and inefficient as hell which is why PCs,be they Apple,Linux, or Windows do not do this, in fact the last personal computers that did such a thing was IIRC the first edition of BeOS.
I've not done an in depth study of their cores but since the Jaguar is the chip in the Athlon 5350 which is a chip I've built several systems with? Well if that chip, which has half the cores and only DDR-3 memory, can game and multitask quite easily with only a couple seconds delay? Then I see no reason why the PS4 and XB1 cannot do the same unless its a software issue.
And it isn't flag waving to point out when an OS has capabilities another apparently does not, or would you consider it being a fanboi to point out that Linux is better at HPC tasks due to the design of its kernel while Windows has a UI better designed for desktops? Its a part of the OS design, a company can choose to make an OS better or faster at specific tasks, its all a trade-off. But I seriously doubt even you are gonna seriously set here and argue that when you are dealing with a netbook APU (read the AMD whitepapers or press releases on Jaguar, they make it quite clear in the first paragraph that they designed the chip for netbooks and tablets) which already has limited processing power due to its ULV nature that locking away 25% of its power strictly for the OS is a good design choice, or are you gonna really argue that OSes are better if they lock away resources from the programs and user?
Oh please, that strawman was debunked ages ago, its no different than the *.A.A claiming that piracy cost them more than the GDP of the planet! All one has to do is look at the incredible mountains of cash valve is generating without putting out new AAA titles in years to see PC gaming is a HUGE money maker and that users do not mind DRM if its not intrusive always online horseshit like UbiSuck.
No lets cut through the bullshit, shall we? The REAL reason that you see so many developing for consoles is that console users are easy to fuck and fuck hard, end of story. They can keep the prices jacked for FAR longer on consoles because they do not have to deal with a free market, with consoles they have a captive monopoly so they are the only game in town. With PC you have Steam and GOG and the Humble Bundles and Origin and UbiPlay and Greeman Gaming and Amazon, with PCs the users have a huge market to shop from and endless titles going back 30+ years so they don't have to put up with the "take it and like it" bullshit. Check a new title 3 weeks after release, where is it cheaper? PC. 3 months? PC, 6 months, a year, 2 years? PC, PC, and PC, simply because if you don't compete? You ain't getting that money.
So don't give us the party line bullshit, its because of money alright, its because they can royally fuck console users and they have no choice but to bend over and take it.
Are the console OSes really so primitive that they cannot handle these things without dedicated cores? Because I have an 8 core and despite the OS having much more to do i have zero effort doing any of the above while playing games and running plenty of background tasks. Considering the hardware of both consoles is really nothing more than an HTPC it seems kinda ridiculous that it cannot perform basic tasks that PCs have been able to do quite easily for ages with hardware that powerful.
Maybe somebody that actually works console dev can chime in with the inside scoop, how primitive are the OSes on these things?
AMD socket AM1, end of story. We're talking a quad core with Radeon graphics for $50 and you can get AM1 boards for $30. Slap in a 4GB stick, the cheapest case with PSU you can find (because the chip maxes out at 25w so any PSU will do) and a cheap HDD and voila! You have a pretty powerful HTPC or office box for sub $150, sub $130 if you shopped around.
Dude have you not be on the Internet lately? there is a billion and one articles extolling using these Pi style boards for HTPCs which as GP pointed out and I agreed with is some serious dumb shit, but its the Internet so there is no lack of dumbshit.
That said I have a buddy that does car PC installs and uses boards like I linked to and for THOSE kinds of embedded projects? They work VERY well, top draw on them boards when playing media is sub 12w, they are fanless, and as I pointed out all the I/O you could need is baked right in.
So again unless your project has a specific requirement to be the size of a stick of gum? The X86 units would probably be a better choice.
Exactly, unless you have an embedded project that needs to have the board be as absolutely tiny as possible it just makes more sense to buy something like this AIO board that gives you dual X86 with a decent GPU capable of doing 1080P over HDMI and with built in Wifi, USB (both 2 and 3), Sata/eSata and Ethernet. By the time you bought all that for one of these? You'd have sunk more money for a less powerful system.
LOL riiiight, I'm sure they are just lining up when the reviews all say the same thing which is Steam machines are completely pointless as they give you NONE of the benefits of a console and NONE of the benefits of a Windows gaming PC. You are paying MORE money for WORSE hardware and without the entire point of consoles, the ease of use and exclusive titles. I can find review after review and they all say the same things, glitchy controller, bad UI, buggy as a pile of shit in August, its a completely pointless product that will only appeal to the Linux faithful...who won't want to have a fucking thing to do with Steam DRM ROFL!
So sorry to burst your bubble but feel free to bookmark this post and come back in 24 months and see its truth, SteamOS will do about as much to spur Linux adoption as Ubuntu has, that is jack and squat. I mean for Pete's sake you no longer even have the "free as in beer" selling point as anybody can download the Windows 10 Insider release and use it for free.
If you call having such bad Linux gaming performance that you would have to buy a card nearly twice the price to equal the same framerate as Windows " treating Linux users just fine"? Then I guess so, I personally wouldn't be too happy if I was a Linux user.
I have games from Win9X through 2015 and I have no issues playing them on my R9 280, in fact the only issues I have playing older games is I often have to bypass the shitastic DRM they used them like Starfuck and SecuSUC which will if you aren't careful try to shoehorn a 32bit kernel driver into a 64bit kernel and fuck the OS. Luckily most of the companies making that shit were so damned cheap they kept their piss poor 16bit installers way into the 32bit era and thus won't be able to run the installer.
But since they switched away from VLIW to GCN things have been nothing but candy and puppies and say what you will but you have to give 'em credit, when they EOLed the old VLIW cards and APUs when they released Crimson? They were at least decent enough to release a beta of Crimson specifically for these older chips that not only gives them any Crimson features that those chips will support but also runs on Win 7-10 so any of the older chips that didn't have Win 10 drivers? Well they do now. I installed it on my E350 netbook from 2011, runs great and even improved my hardware video acceleration.
I think its pretty obvious what it is...its SVCHOSTS for Linux, a once simple idea that continued to grow until more and more of the system is running it and won't run without it.
Considering how all Red Hat talks about now is virtualization and the cloud? Mark my words Linux will be nothing but a VM running on SystemD in 5 years, I wonder if Linus will stick around when Linux is a second class citizen running on top of a system he has zero control over or input in?
It was the CEO BEFORE the last one that burnt the company for the insurance, that is how this works. Its the same with AMD, the current CEO is trying to stop the bleeding, even going so far as to hire back the designer of the Athlon64 from Apple, but it was the one after the founder (Rory Read I think, but they went through 3 real quickly) that fired everybody and cashed out.
You see its like playing hot potato, you don't want to be the one left with the bag.
Sigh...you REALLY don't know how this shit works, do you? Let old Hairy break it down for ya, mmkay?
1.-Corp A MBA (Master of Being an Asshole) gets hired, he fires everybody and replaces them with outsourcing. 2.- Because you have a broken stock market thanks to the billions pumped in by the feds thanks to 401Ks and 403Bs you have a market filled with gamblers so the second they see Corp A profits went up? Stock bounces, MBA gets credit for his "aggressive cost cutting measures". 3.- MBA cashes out, gets hired by new corp based on his "stellar cost cutting skills" at Corp A. 4.- Corp A goes belly up but by that time MBA has moved on and so gets none of the blame! Lather rinse repeat.
If you want a couple examples of this in action just look at Circuit City, where the MBA fired all the high paid employees (who were making that much because they were highly knowledgeable and good at making sales) and replaced them with any kid they could get off the street. Stock bounced, cash out, company went to shit because the kids didn't know shit and just wandered the store. Or AMD, who is just now beginning to struggle back from the horrible blow dealt to them by their MBA, which at a critical juncture fired all the chip designers and replaced them with automated layouts, which give you more than 10% wasted space and more power usage than hand design. Stock bounced, he cashed out, lather rinse repeat.
So I hate to break the news to ya, but logic and sanity? Really have no place in this arena, we're talking about an arena run by sociopaths that have NO problem burning a place to the ground and costing thousands of their fellow Americans everything they own if it'll give them a 10% stock bounce and a golden parachute. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
And given the information they had at the time, on how Stalin had purged millions and killed millions more with the Holodomor? He had every reason to not want us involved. Lets be frank, there were NO good choices between Hitler and Stalin, BOTH were about as evil and vicious as you could get, and even former president Hoover recommended we stay out and let them destroy each other and then we could attack the weakened "victor" and liberate Europe which considering the Iron Curtain and the amount of lives and money wasted during the cold war? Probably would have been a wise choice.
Sorry but you are incorrect, AMD doesn't have any nasty shit in the CPU. There was talk a couple years back of adding an ARM DRM chip for those business customers that wanted a TPM style system but nothing ever came of it.
You can now happily go buy an AMD CPU based system which they opened the docs on a couple years back (they even go so far as to pay devs on both the Coreboot and FOSS driver teams so to speed up support of their chips) and as far as their APUs are concerned the only part of the docs you cannot have are the parts concerning HDMI HDCP, which is property of Intel and thus cannot be shared. Of course if you do not use HDCP protected content you won't have to worry about it as the whitepapers show the AMD APUs simply use a small "shim" to protect the memory on a part of the GPU normally used for graphics, as unlike Intel they do not dedicate silicon for HDCP.
BTW if you want to make an "upgradeable" laptop your best bet would be AMD socket AM1, it uses less than 25w under load for the fastest chip, has a nice Radeon GPU capable of 1080P over HDMI for all 4 chips in the line, and is very affordable with the most expensive (2.07 Ghz quad APU) only costing $54, which means you could make a really nice affordable laptop with those chips rather easily.
My apologies then, been dealing with some serious nutjobs on Disqus, don't know which is worse, the Win 10 worshippers or the Apple iHeads, both are batshit.
LULWut? You DO know that Macs have more vulnerabilities than Windows right? And that your parents would have to live in someplace like NYC or LA for the cost of a decent MB to be cheaper than a half dozen or more service calls, yes? Hell the most expensive shops that I know of only charge $40 an hour for service calls and unless they are incompetent most jobs can be handled in under an hour...your parents would have to be calling a couple times a week for 6 months just for you to break even! Finally I have yet to meet this "mythical person" that only uses a browser, if that was your parents? Get them a tablet or put them on Ubuntu, but more likely they have multiple Windows programs they use, hell that is what they got the PC to run in the first place!
So sorry Macs are NOT the answer to elderly parents, it will cost more, create more problems than it solves, the only one that will benefit from that move is Apple shareholders.
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She has a vagina?
Jesus I wish it weren't so but talking to people that say they are voting for Hillary when I ask them "What position does he have that you support? What policies has she supported in office that has caused you to vote for her?" and what do I get? Crickets. So you finally ask them why they are voting for her you get the "strong independent woman" meme, emphasis on the woman part.
So if you want to know why they support Hillary? at least in my area its strictly because she is a woman, they do not care about anything else.
You should try Comodo Dragon, or if you want to be bleeding edge Comodo Chromodo as the problem is NOT the Chromium engine, its the crap Google bolted on top. Comodo don't bolt that shit, nor does it phone home like Google's browser, and they are fast fast fast!
I use Pale Moon as a backup but at the end of the day I have never seen a Chromium engine browser lock up, I've seen Gecko based engines lock up at least once every browser session. Like it or not sticking with a single process engine really hurts any browser based on Mozilla's engine, its just a bad way to do it in 2015. But I stick with my previous assertion, once somebody switches? The other guy has to do something REALLY dumb to get users to switch back. Most don't notice resource usage BTW, so you are the exception and not the rule.
Sorry but if it works without the keyboard? Its a tablet.
While I'll never have one (found tablets to be rather useless compared to my netbook) I do have tons of experience dealing with customers laptops and the vast majority? Around 3 hours was what they wanted out of their laptops, anything above that was gravy. This makes sense as when was the last time you were away from an outlet for more than 3 hours?
As for MSFT beating Apple with the Surface? Again not surprising as talking to those that have one they really love the things and since it runs a full Windows OS (instead of that dumbshit Windows RT) they can leverage all that third party Windows software. I know the main reason I'm given when people are trying to practically give away their tablets to me at the shop is "it doesn't run what I need it to" IE Windows software so for those that like the tablet form factor but want to be able to run the same software they run on their desktop? Its an easy sell.
It does make me wonder if this will hurt Apple long term as there is a lot more people with Windows software they want to run than iOS software, perhaps this will spur Apple into making some sort of "MacTablet Pro" with a full OSX on it, I'm sure many here would just love to have a tablet running OSX.
With Windows if you are good at running say a Win2K server? Its really not hard to pick up Server 2K12, the underlying guts and conventions with WinServer really don't change much from what I've seen. That USED TO BE the same with Linux, but now you have the snarling hydra that is SystemD gobbling up functions left and right.
I really wish it weren't true but it does hold true to my theory that MSFT never has to worry because the biggest threat to Linux is its devs and NIH syndrome. Hell look at what happened when MSFT put out the Vista Bomb, you had the major DEs throw out years worth of work for bug ridden alpha quality code that every distro instantly made default, Windows 8? Larry Potter and the Pulsing Puking Audio, I swear if I didn't know better I'd think Linux was run by a bunch of devs from Bizzaro who sit around saying things like "Oh No, things am stable and everything is working, this will make things too easy! We must break critical drivers and subsystems with am patch and replace well written system with alpha code, then users will feel they am leet for getting it running half as good as it did and we get fat support contracts...aren't me am smart?"
More like "if they are gonna make this look like Chrome I'll just use Chrome, as its faster and doesn't hang like FF does". Is that REALLY so surprising, that if you make your product a bad ersatz of a very popular product that users might just go for the more popular one you ripped off, especially when they are both free?
At the end of the day numbers don't lie, and it looks like Mozilla is going the way of Netscape, with many users following mine and just going somewhere else and the worst part for Mozilla? Once people switch to something else nothing THEY do matters, because users will stick with the new browser as long as they don't do something radical or stupid and it doesn't look like Google, Pale Moon project, or Comodo are be as dumb as Mozilla was.
I don't think it'll help, they burned too many bridges with their "fuck the users!" attitude they've had these past several years. I know that FF was the #1 browser for my customers for several years and since Australis every.single.one has asked me to help them move to something else or gone to Chrome. I don't even bother packing FF in to my default install package anymore, they keep screwing with things so much they leave a bad taste in my customer's mouths.
Instead for those that use extensions or just prefer the originalk FF UI I offer them the choice of Pale Moon or Ice Dragon, Ice Dragon is a little more secure since it can integrate with Comodo IS to auto sandbox on launch while Pale Moon is more like old school Firefox but both are really good browsers.
But sadly I just don't see FF coming back, they have peed in their corn flake one time too many and alienated so many users I just don't see them being able to lure them back, not to mention it looks like Mozilla is about to get fucked by Yahoo with rumors pointing to Yahoo selling off most of their core assets, possibly even selling off everything and shutting down. I think if that happens they are just fucked, as nobody is gonna pay the hundreds of millions they got from Google and Yahoo for their search, not with numbers as low as they are.
Now who is jumping to conclusions? I don't prefer ANY platform, in fact I still have a Dreamcast and an original Xbox because those units had capabilities beyond playing games in their genre, Emulation for the Dreamcast and usage as an HTPC for the Xbox.
But if unit A can do X and has been doing X, despite much less resources, and unit Y cannot wtf are you supposed to say about unit Y, that its lack of capability makes it better?
But its obvious that you are a fantard with exactly fuck and all knowledge about this subject so please go back to waving your little flag nobody gives a fuck about, you are not worth wasting my time.
If I drove a Prius at 110MPH for 200 hours and it failed....would that make the Prius a POS car? Of course not because I was using the vehicle in a way it was never designed and thus contributed to its failure.
Well I hate to break the news to you but its for that very reason the Google survey is worthless, as they took consumer drives and then saturated the pipe 24/7/365 until they failed, again something that those units were never designed to do, in fact I can guarantee that wasn't even a scenario they looked at because the average consumer? They aren't slamming the living fuck out of their drives 24/7!
If you use the Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi and WD drives like a normal person does which is 4-12 hours a day of moderate workloads? Then SMART does exactly as intended and warns them ahead of time, I should know because I probably bin a good 70-100 drives a year because they've worn out and again its been years where there weren't quite obvious warning signs like delayed write failure warnings and SMART errors. Contrast this to the many SSDs I've binned where the user just fired their PC up one morning and...nothing. No warning, no error, you just get a brick that can't be seen by EFI/BIOS, you might as well have tried to put a ham sandwich on the SATA bus for all the warning you get.
Not as long as your average HDD does and with the race to the bottom? Its only gonna get worse.
The reason why many drives were so high in 2012 is most were SLC while today its pretty damned hard to find anything other than enterprise that isn't MLC, in fact I don't think a single manufacturer makes an SSD that is SLC for the consumer market anymore. Whats worse is as they keep adding bits to MLC to both increase capacity and lower cost the MTBF for each cell just plummets and on its best day with perfect conditions you're looking at 10k writes with MLC versus 100,000 writes with SLC, and that was with the original 2 bits per cell, according to Wikipedia its now up to 4 bits per cell.
Now does this mean I think we should avoid SSDs? Nope in fact they are the boot drives on most new builds and swapping HDDs for SSDs on laptops is the least expensive way I know of to boost performance, but I make sure they have a HDD with a backup image, whether its built in or USB, because IMHO its unwise to trust your important data to an SSD.
Finally the rotting elephant in the room with SSDs is the way they fail and that is without warning. I'm sure I'll be slammed with anecdotes about HDDs that failed without warning (Protip: Avoid Seagate) but honestly its been quite a few years since I've seen a HDD just fail without giving the user plenty of warning, with an SSD? I've thrown many an SSD into the trash because they failed without warning.
TLDR? In a race to the bottom like SSDs is in now quality goes to shit as does MTBF, for years HDDs have been proven reliable tech and as its capacity climbs by adding more bits per cell SSDs will give up life and reliability for size.
So asking about an OS architecture and its capabilities is trolling now? Well wtf is the point of asking questions here, lets all just wave our little flags like a bunch of fanbois, shall we?
And how does it not have to do with the OS being primitive when it comes to multitasking when PCs have been able to do this for years and do so with ease? I get that for the majority of its life consoles have been single tasking systems but surely they could hire some OS developers to get them up to speed, yes? Because even my netbook APU (which is the chip they based the Jaguar on) can easily switch from a game like Grimlock to a howto page within a couple seconds, faster if I could be arsed to swap out the 5400RPM HDD to an SSD.
So are these OSes simply incapable of FIFO round robin processing? Or have the companies that made them simply decided this was not something worth pursuing? Because dedicating an entire X86 APU to the UI, let alone two? I'm sorry but you can scream and whine all you want, that is wasteful and inefficient as hell which is why PCs,be they Apple,Linux, or Windows do not do this, in fact the last personal computers that did such a thing was IIRC the first edition of BeOS.
I've not done an in depth study of their cores but since the Jaguar is the chip in the Athlon 5350 which is a chip I've built several systems with? Well if that chip, which has half the cores and only DDR-3 memory, can game and multitask quite easily with only a couple seconds delay? Then I see no reason why the PS4 and XB1 cannot do the same unless its a software issue.
And it isn't flag waving to point out when an OS has capabilities another apparently does not, or would you consider it being a fanboi to point out that Linux is better at HPC tasks due to the design of its kernel while Windows has a UI better designed for desktops? Its a part of the OS design, a company can choose to make an OS better or faster at specific tasks, its all a trade-off. But I seriously doubt even you are gonna seriously set here and argue that when you are dealing with a netbook APU (read the AMD whitepapers or press releases on Jaguar, they make it quite clear in the first paragraph that they designed the chip for netbooks and tablets) which already has limited processing power due to its ULV nature that locking away 25% of its power strictly for the OS is a good design choice, or are you gonna really argue that OSes are better if they lock away resources from the programs and user?
Oh please, that strawman was debunked ages ago, its no different than the *.A.A claiming that piracy cost them more than the GDP of the planet! All one has to do is look at the incredible mountains of cash valve is generating without putting out new AAA titles in years to see PC gaming is a HUGE money maker and that users do not mind DRM if its not intrusive always online horseshit like UbiSuck.
No lets cut through the bullshit, shall we? The REAL reason that you see so many developing for consoles is that console users are easy to fuck and fuck hard, end of story. They can keep the prices jacked for FAR longer on consoles because they do not have to deal with a free market, with consoles they have a captive monopoly so they are the only game in town. With PC you have Steam and GOG and the Humble Bundles and Origin and UbiPlay and Greeman Gaming and Amazon, with PCs the users have a huge market to shop from and endless titles going back 30+ years so they don't have to put up with the "take it and like it" bullshit. Check a new title 3 weeks after release, where is it cheaper? PC. 3 months? PC, 6 months, a year, 2 years? PC, PC, and PC, simply because if you don't compete? You ain't getting that money.
So don't give us the party line bullshit, its because of money alright, its because they can royally fuck console users and they have no choice but to bend over and take it.
Are the console OSes really so primitive that they cannot handle these things without dedicated cores? Because I have an 8 core and despite the OS having much more to do i have zero effort doing any of the above while playing games and running plenty of background tasks. Considering the hardware of both consoles is really nothing more than an HTPC it seems kinda ridiculous that it cannot perform basic tasks that PCs have been able to do quite easily for ages with hardware that powerful.
Maybe somebody that actually works console dev can chime in with the inside scoop, how primitive are the OSes on these things?
AMD socket AM1, end of story. We're talking a quad core with Radeon graphics for $50 and you can get AM1 boards for $30. Slap in a 4GB stick, the cheapest case with PSU you can find (because the chip maxes out at 25w so any PSU will do) and a cheap HDD and voila! You have a pretty powerful HTPC or office box for sub $150, sub $130 if you shopped around.
Dude have you not be on the Internet lately? there is a billion and one articles extolling using these Pi style boards for HTPCs which as GP pointed out and I agreed with is some serious dumb shit, but its the Internet so there is no lack of dumbshit.
That said I have a buddy that does car PC installs and uses boards like I linked to and for THOSE kinds of embedded projects? They work VERY well, top draw on them boards when playing media is sub 12w, they are fanless, and as I pointed out all the I/O you could need is baked right in.
So again unless your project has a specific requirement to be the size of a stick of gum? The X86 units would probably be a better choice.
Exactly, unless you have an embedded project that needs to have the board be as absolutely tiny as possible it just makes more sense to buy something like this AIO board that gives you dual X86 with a decent GPU capable of doing 1080P over HDMI and with built in Wifi, USB (both 2 and 3), Sata/eSata and Ethernet. By the time you bought all that for one of these? You'd have sunk more money for a less powerful system.
LOL riiiight, I'm sure they are just lining up when the reviews all say the same thing which is Steam machines are completely pointless as they give you NONE of the benefits of a console and NONE of the benefits of a Windows gaming PC. You are paying MORE money for WORSE hardware and without the entire point of consoles, the ease of use and exclusive titles. I can find review after review and they all say the same things, glitchy controller, bad UI, buggy as a pile of shit in August, its a completely pointless product that will only appeal to the Linux faithful...who won't want to have a fucking thing to do with Steam DRM ROFL!
So sorry to burst your bubble but feel free to bookmark this post and come back in 24 months and see its truth, SteamOS will do about as much to spur Linux adoption as Ubuntu has, that is jack and squat. I mean for Pete's sake you no longer even have the "free as in beer" selling point as anybody can download the Windows 10 Insider release and use it for free.
If you call having such bad Linux gaming performance that you would have to buy a card nearly twice the price to equal the same framerate as Windows " treating Linux users just fine"? Then I guess so, I personally wouldn't be too happy if I was a Linux user.
I have games from Win9X through 2015 and I have no issues playing them on my R9 280, in fact the only issues I have playing older games is I often have to bypass the shitastic DRM they used them like Starfuck and SecuSUC which will if you aren't careful try to shoehorn a 32bit kernel driver into a 64bit kernel and fuck the OS. Luckily most of the companies making that shit were so damned cheap they kept their piss poor 16bit installers way into the 32bit era and thus won't be able to run the installer.
But since they switched away from VLIW to GCN things have been nothing but candy and puppies and say what you will but you have to give 'em credit, when they EOLed the old VLIW cards and APUs when they released Crimson? They were at least decent enough to release a beta of Crimson specifically for these older chips that not only gives them any Crimson features that those chips will support but also runs on Win 7-10 so any of the older chips that didn't have Win 10 drivers? Well they do now. I installed it on my E350 netbook from 2011, runs great and even improved my hardware video acceleration.
I think its pretty obvious what it is...its SVCHOSTS for Linux, a once simple idea that continued to grow until more and more of the system is running it and won't run without it.
Considering how all Red Hat talks about now is virtualization and the cloud? Mark my words Linux will be nothing but a VM running on SystemD in 5 years, I wonder if Linus will stick around when Linux is a second class citizen running on top of a system he has zero control over or input in?
It was the CEO BEFORE the last one that burnt the company for the insurance, that is how this works. Its the same with AMD, the current CEO is trying to stop the bleeding, even going so far as to hire back the designer of the Athlon64 from Apple, but it was the one after the founder (Rory Read I think, but they went through 3 real quickly) that fired everybody and cashed out.
You see its like playing hot potato, you don't want to be the one left with the bag.
Sigh...you REALLY don't know how this shit works, do you? Let old Hairy break it down for ya, mmkay?
1.-Corp A MBA (Master of Being an Asshole) gets hired, he fires everybody and replaces them with outsourcing. 2.- Because you have a broken stock market thanks to the billions pumped in by the feds thanks to 401Ks and 403Bs you have a market filled with gamblers so the second they see Corp A profits went up? Stock bounces, MBA gets credit for his "aggressive cost cutting measures". 3.- MBA cashes out, gets hired by new corp based on his "stellar cost cutting skills" at Corp A. 4.- Corp A goes belly up but by that time MBA has moved on and so gets none of the blame! Lather rinse repeat.
If you want a couple examples of this in action just look at Circuit City, where the MBA fired all the high paid employees (who were making that much because they were highly knowledgeable and good at making sales) and replaced them with any kid they could get off the street. Stock bounced, cash out, company went to shit because the kids didn't know shit and just wandered the store. Or AMD, who is just now beginning to struggle back from the horrible blow dealt to them by their MBA, which at a critical juncture fired all the chip designers and replaced them with automated layouts, which give you more than 10% wasted space and more power usage than hand design. Stock bounced, he cashed out, lather rinse repeat.
So I hate to break the news to ya, but logic and sanity? Really have no place in this arena, we're talking about an arena run by sociopaths that have NO problem burning a place to the ground and costing thousands of their fellow Americans everything they own if it'll give them a 10% stock bounce and a golden parachute. Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
And given the information they had at the time, on how Stalin had purged millions and killed millions more with the Holodomor? He had every reason to not want us involved. Lets be frank, there were NO good choices between Hitler and Stalin, BOTH were about as evil and vicious as you could get, and even former president Hoover recommended we stay out and let them destroy each other and then we could attack the weakened "victor" and liberate Europe which considering the Iron Curtain and the amount of lives and money wasted during the cold war? Probably would have been a wise choice.
Sorry but you are incorrect, AMD doesn't have any nasty shit in the CPU. There was talk a couple years back of adding an ARM DRM chip for those business customers that wanted a TPM style system but nothing ever came of it.
You can now happily go buy an AMD CPU based system which they opened the docs on a couple years back (they even go so far as to pay devs on both the Coreboot and FOSS driver teams so to speed up support of their chips) and as far as their APUs are concerned the only part of the docs you cannot have are the parts concerning HDMI HDCP, which is property of Intel and thus cannot be shared. Of course if you do not use HDCP protected content you won't have to worry about it as the whitepapers show the AMD APUs simply use a small "shim" to protect the memory on a part of the GPU normally used for graphics, as unlike Intel they do not dedicate silicon for HDCP.
BTW if you want to make an "upgradeable" laptop your best bet would be AMD socket AM1, it uses less than 25w under load for the fastest chip, has a nice Radeon GPU capable of 1080P over HDMI for all 4 chips in the line, and is very affordable with the most expensive (2.07 Ghz quad APU) only costing $54, which means you could make a really nice affordable laptop with those chips rather easily.
My apologies then, been dealing with some serious nutjobs on Disqus, don't know which is worse, the Win 10 worshippers or the Apple iHeads, both are batshit.
LULWut? You DO know that Macs have more vulnerabilities than Windows right? And that your parents would have to live in someplace like NYC or LA for the cost of a decent MB to be cheaper than a half dozen or more service calls, yes? Hell the most expensive shops that I know of only charge $40 an hour for service calls and unless they are incompetent most jobs can be handled in under an hour...your parents would have to be calling a couple times a week for 6 months just for you to break even! Finally I have yet to meet this "mythical person" that only uses a browser, if that was your parents? Get them a tablet or put them on Ubuntu, but more likely they have multiple Windows programs they use, hell that is what they got the PC to run in the first place!
So sorry Macs are NOT the answer to elderly parents, it will cost more, create more problems than it solves, the only one that will benefit from that move is Apple shareholders.